I’ve been thinking a lot about this article in The Guardian I read a few days ago, where novelist Lynn Steger Strong talks about the financial difficulties of making it as a writer. We all know that paying your bills through any kind of creative work is a daunting challenge, but Strong’s article shines some light on whether we talk about our financial situations honestly, or with a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Quick note—this post will probably make a lot more sense if you read Strong’s article first. If you’re in a hurry or otherwise don’t want to, though, no sweat—you should still be able to get something out of this post!
Working in a Creative Field is a Whole Lot Easier if You Have Outside Financial Help
Strong gives a lot of examples of how writers (and by extension, anyone working in a creative field) can go a lot farther with an extra boost of cold hard cash. She lists a few examples of how creative people get income or other financial help through outside sources: parents who helped with college tuition, a grandparent who supplied the down payment for a house, a high-earning spouse who works as a corporate lawyer, and others that should ring familiar.
Outside financial help is a HUGE boost because it helps keep the bills paid while you pursue your creative work, which in turn means that you’ll spend less time doing Day Job work you don’t really want to do. In some cases, said financial help might even bring in enough so you can live comfortably (or even more than comfortably, with ivory backscratchers and the like).
It’d be a stretch to call this outside help cheating per se, but it does give you a leg up over other creative people who don’t have that same help. After all, a person would probably be pretty stupid to refuse decent financial help, no matter what form it took.
Think about it: outside financial help means less financial pressure, and potentially more time spent on your creative work. Not having to bring in as much bill-paying money is also likely to reduce your stress levels, and make it even easier to sit down with that creative work during your preferred time of day instead of having to slot it into evenings and weekends.
All told, this means you’ll have a distinct advantage over people who don’t have some kind of outside help and who subsequently have to work a Day Job and deal with all the work and stress that comes with it.
The outside help I’m talking about doesn’t just involve money—it can also involve better work contacts. For example, if you wanted to work in the movie business and your parents also work in the movie business, there’s a good chance they could introduce you to someone who could help you out. Those of us whose parents aren’t in the movie business—well, we’re basically on our own
The importance of outside help is something that’s really worth understanding—because, as Strong writes, if you ignore this uneven playing field, it makes writing (and by extension, other creative pursuits) seem like they’re easier to break into than they really are.
How Much Economic Privilege Do You Have?
This is a question worth asking yourself—I recommend that you stop right now (again, I’ll wait) and reflect on all the aspects of your life, especially early on, that have given you a leg up over others.
…and since I like to play fair on my own blog, here’s a quick list of things that may have given me a leg up too:
- I grew up in a stable house with two parents who never seemed to have trouble keeping the bills paid.
- My parents paid for half of my college tuition.
- My mom helped me get a pretty decent writing/research internship during college.
- My dad is a former auto mechanic who taught me the basics of working on cars, thus saving me a lot of money on repairs over time.
- I got my first job in Japan in part because of a connection through my old Japanese host brother.
- I don’t have any major medical issues, conditions, or maladies that require expensive treatment or that put me out of commission for long periods of time.
(Note that this list focuses on financial stuff only, as opposed to identity stuff like not having to deal with creepy sexual harassment as a guy, or being less likely to get treated badly by police as a white guy—that shit’s a whole other can of worms…)
Looking at my list, I’m not sure where I’d fall on some sort of hypothetical Economic Privilege Spectrum. Like, imagine if everyone in the world (or at least, in the developed world) were to list all the ways they’d been given an advantage. Imagine that we could then somehow rank everyone objectively on an Economic Privilege Spectrum to better compare people’s advantages. If this were somehow possible (and if it were, it’d be damned difficult), I’m not sure where I’d fall.
The biggest advantage on my list is definitely Number Two—I know a lot of people whose parents didn’t/couldn’t help them pay for college at all, so I consider myself really lucky that my parents paid half of the bill. Knowing this affected where I chose to go to college (shout-out to Bennington!) and how much I worked when I was in school, and made it a little easier to relax knowing that I wouldn’t be in six-figure debt after graduation.
…but then again, I also know people whose parents paid for 100% of their college, and who graduated without any student loans at all. These people had a much easier time than me after graduation since they didn’t have mountains of student debt looming over their heads…which I was definitely jealous of ;-)
The point is that I, like most of the people reading, fall someone in the middle on the Economic Privilege Spectrum. I’ve had some advantages that have helped me out, but not nearly as many as some other people.
We Owe It to the People Around Us to Be Honest About Our Advantages and Privilege Level
I write about my own advantages not to brag about them, but because I want to give people an honest idea of where I stand as a creative person.
One of the most vivid moments from Strong’s article (which you did read, didn’t you???) involves her story of a fellow debut novelist who claimed during a panel discussion that they “wrote and taught exclusively.” Strong herself knows this writer’s financial situation: the writer’s just spent all their book advance money on a publicist, and their main source of income is adjunct teaching work at $1,500-$3,000 for a six-to-eight-week course. Clearly, this writer gets some sort of outside help in paying their New York City rent, though instead of being honest about where their money comes from (high-earning partner, parental help, large inheritance, etc.), they put up the smoke-and-mirrors response of saying that they “wrote and taught exclusively.”
Illusions like this are dangerous because they make the creative person’s achievements seem more impressive than they really are. Of course someone will have an easier time making it as a writer if their partner brings in a half-million bucks a year, but only mentioning their writing and teaching income makes them seem like they’ve achieved more than they really have. Worse yet, it’s taking advantage of our admiration for the American dream by pretending to be a part of that rags-to-riches mythos—and in this sense, hiding your outside help is a ploy to get people to give you more respect than you deserve. That’s not cool.
I don’t want to lie about my income, how I pay my bills, or how much privilege I’ve had. In my list of every job I’ve ever had I was careful to include my actual wage and salary for every one of those jobs. I currently earn ¥3,600,000 per year (about $33,000 US) as a second-year ALT in the JET program, pay ¥11,000 in rent (about $105 US), and a US-Japan tax treaty means that I don’t have to pay Japanese taxes for two years. I’ve also outlined my expenses and talked about how much it really costs to live in Japan, which you can read here. My job is relatively low stress, and most days I come home ready and able to dive into creative work.
I’m honest about this stuff online because I want to build trust with people who follow me by showing them where I lie on the Privilege Spectrum. I want people in general to know how hard or easy it is to make it as a writer, and the nitty-gritty of how creative people’s finances really work. I don’t want to perpetuate deceptive smoke-and-mirrors tricks about where I came from or how I make my living. Instead, I want to be honest, build trust, and show people the way things really are—in my creative work, and in everything else I do.